“Tension over the fiscal crisis eased on Monday as President Barack Obama called more opposition lawmakers to find a way to stop $85 billion in damaging budget cuts and congressional Republicans announced a plan to prevent a government shutdown,” David Lawder and Richard Cowan wrote in a Reuters online article yesterday.
Lawder and Cowan continued, “Eager to resolve fiscal fights overshadowing his second term, the Democratic president called Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins and Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn after speaking to other Republican senators over the weekend. An aide to Collins, a moderate, told Reuters that the pair discussed the need for a bipartisan agreement on critical issues such as reining in the $16.7 trillion federal debt and dealing with the cuts, also known as sequestration. In telephone calls over the weekend, Obama raised the issue of cutting entitlement programs, which include Medicare, the healthcare program for the elderly and disabled, and Social Security retirement benefits. ‘I will continue to seek out partners on the other side of the aisle so that we can create the kind of balanced approach of spending cuts, revenues, entitlement reform that everybody knows is the right way to do things,’ he said at the start of a Cabinet meeting on Monday.” Read the full article here.
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